In Victory, the GOP Will Turn on Each Other

Here's some good news for Democrats who've been blue lately: The coming GOP congressional surge will inevitably lead to a lot of disarray on the right. There will be infighting, bickering and charges of betrayal aplenty. The tea-infused populists will bark at -- and sometimes bite -- the so-called elitists. Many in the Republican establishment will, in turn, show no small amount of ingratitude to the populists who breathed new life into it.

Now, this might seem like cold comfort to those liberals who actually believed their own hype about President Obama ushering in what Time magazine called a "new liberal order" that was supposed to last a generation but began petering out when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.

Indeed, consoling liberals with the prediction that impending GOP success will yield Republican infighting is a bit like telling a Roman aristocrat that the invading barbarians will squabble over who gets to keep all your stuff.

So if liberals will take no solace from this prediction, perhaps conservatives will. You wouldn't know it from much of the mainstream news media coverage, which has focused almost entirely on the Tea Parties and the GOP, but the 2010 midterms were never about the Republicans. Think about how much coverage you've seen of Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell or New York gubernatorial contender Carl Paladino, two candidates who were always long shots at best. Now think how little you've seen of say, Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin rookie politician poised to defeat Russ Feingold, the progressive lion of the Senate now that Teddy Kennedy is gone. Johnson is a solid, serious, candidate and hence bad copy for a press corps at least in part eager to keep the attention off the Democrats.

In short, as John Podhoretz recently wrote in the New York Post, this election isn't a coronation for the Republicans as it's a vote of no confidence in the Democrats. The political turmoil on the right, most commonly understood as "the Tea Parties vs. the establishment," that we've witnessed over the last year was in many respects a sideshow compared with the fact that support of Obama and the Democrats among independents, moderate Republicans, the elderly and, most recently, among women and low-income families, has cratered. Last week's New York Times/CBS News poll found that for the first time since 1982, when polling began, the GOP has the edge among women. For the most part, the bulk of these voters aren't moving to the GOP so much as they are fleeing the Democrats. That's how it works in a two-party system; one side's loss is the other side's gain.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online,and the author of the book The Tyranny of Clichés. You can reach him via Twitter @JonahNRO.
TOWNHALL DAILY: Be the first to read Jonah Goldberg's column. Sign up today and receive Townhall.com daily lineup delivered each morning to your inbox.

Misc.

Mobile

About Townhall.com

Townhall.com is the leading source for conservative news and political commentary and analysis.

Townhall is packed with breaking news headlines, political news, and conservative opinion with Townhall columnists including Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Michael Barone, Star Parker, Dennis Prager, Thomas Sowell, and many more of your favorite conservatives.
Political cartoons full of satire and political humor from editorial cartoonists including Michael Ramirez, Glenn McCoy, and Henry Payne.

Townhall.com also features the latest news videos and pictures on the latest political hot topics including health care reform, the economy, immigration, government tax, President Obama, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Iraq, immigration, politics, gay marriage laws, and many more big news issues.